The Domination

Chapter Thirteen

EARTH ORBIT

PLATFORM FRONTIER FIVE

ALLIANCE SPACE FORCE

MAY 6, 1982

Earth turned beyond the dome like a giant blue shield streaked with the white of clouds, glowing softly with an intense pale light. The western coast of North America was on the edge of vision, turning toward night, and the sunlight glittered on the ocean through a scattering of cirrus. There were scattered spots of light across the surface, above the last azure haze of atmosphere, moving or drifting in orbit. Spidery cages of aluminum beam extended in every direction in a latticework that linked powersails, broadcast rectennae, machinery of less obvious purpose. Further out were docking arms of tubing connected to the main pressure modules behind them; two held passenger scramjets, long melted-looking delta aircraft, featureless save for the big squarish ramjet intakes under the rear of their lifting-body shapes.

It was an old story to Frederick Lefarge. He twisted in the air to watch his wife’s face instead. How did I ever luck out like this? he thought. The pale chill-blue light washed across the hazel-green of her eyes, the mahogany hair and olive-bronze skin. Tears glistened at the corners of her eyes.

“Listen,” she said softly. Her voice had an accent that was a blend of her mother’s South Carolina drawl and her father’s Spanish-Mayan; soft and lilting at the same time. “You can hear it.”

“What?” he said.

“The music of the spheres,” she answered, then scrubbed the back of her hand across her eyes.

A bell pinged. “All passengers, flight Hermes 17A, forty minutes to final call. Forty minutes to final call.”

“Damn, I wish you’d change your mind,” he said fiercely.

“Honey,” she replied, smiling. “How many times have we been over this? I wouldn’t be anything but a burden for the next month; need-to-know, remember?”

She nodded to the scattering of people on the floor and sides of the domed lounge. Lefarge felt the familiar vertigo-inducing twist of perception, and now he was looking down with the great curve of Earth above his head. A ground ape’s fear of falling passed through him unnoticed, and he studied the others. Several dozen. You could tell the Space Forcers and old stationjacks, and not just by their clothing; to them a floor was just another wall, and they used the ripstick pads on feet and knees and elbows to negotiate their way with innocent disregard for orientation. You never saw them drifting free without a handhold, either, like that hapless woman wearing a sari of all things, thrashing in midair until a crewman anchored a line from the reel at his belt and leaped out to her.

Most of the rest were those who would be leaving on the Pathfinder. Forty of the eighty, come for a last look at the home that none would see again for years, many never again. The majority were young, more than half men, technical workers of every type. He saw tears, laughter, raucous good humor, nervous excitement among the handful of children. There was a scattering of older folk, married couples solemn with the thought of what this meant. His own two daughters were already aboard the Pathfinder, sleeping in their cocoon-cribs in Cindy’s cabin. His stomach twisted at the thought.

“You’d be aboard a warship, if you waited,” he said.

Cindy sighed. “Honey, it’s important I get to know some of the project people without . . . well, without you around.” There were a dozen recruits for the New America project aboard, the rest were leaving at Ceres. But only one who has any inkling of the real project, he thought. In time, in time. Patience.

His wife was continuing: “Free people don’t like living under War Emergency Regulations, Fred. For things to work right, they’ve got to want them to work right, and for that they’ve got to see you as a human being, not some all-powerful bureaucrat. What better way than to get to know your wife and children, on a three-month voyage? There’s only a few thousand people in the whole Belt, darling, and a few hundred on the Project. We’re going to be a real small town for a long while.” Quietly. “Let me do my part for this too, Fred.”

Cindy was cleared for the third-level version of the Project, but he suspected she had guessed more.

“It isn’t safe,” he said.

“Darling, it’s safer than coming out on the cruiser. It’s been years since there was a clash in the Belt, isn’t it? And the only incidents have been between warships.”

He ran a hand through his hair, sighed. “Okay, okay, you convinced me before. The only thing the Snakes have scheduled is an expedition out to Jupiter, anyway.” Pulsedrive warships were still not common, and mostly very fully occupied.

“And we will get to Ceres about the same time,” she continued with gentle ruthlessness. His ship would be leaving much later, but the Ethan Allen was a new-launched pulsedrive cruiser, vastly more powerful. This would be her shakedown trip, in fact.

“All right, Cindy! I just hope Captain Hayakawa understands how important a cargo he’s hauling.”

They linked hands, and she pulled herself closer, putting an arm around his waist and her head on his shoulder. The hair that drifted up around his nose was short-cropped (nothing else was practical in zero-G), but it shone in the Earth-light, smelling faintly of Colorado Mist shampoo and flowers. Her gaze went back out to the curve of the planet above.

“Well,” she said, “he is carrying part of something precious.” At his glance, she added: “Hope, for our tired old mother there. Up here, where there’s room to breathe.” She dimpled. “Even if there isn’t much air . . . ”

“You’re a romantic,” he laughed. Somberly. “And the Snakes are here, too.”

She nodded. “Like our shadows,” she said, sadly. “Or like an ancient set of armor with nothing inside but a corpse that’s rotting and pitiful and thinks it’s alive, walking and clanking and killing and trying to eat . . . ”

“For a nice person, you’ve got a way with images,” he said, shivering slightly at the thought. It was appropriate, though. The Domination was something that should have died a century ago. And it’s my job to bury it, he thought as they turned and braced their feet against the crosswire.

“Gently does it, honey,” he said.

They pushed off, floating down the ten meters to the deck; he kept his arm around Cindy’s waist as they twisted end-for-end and landed. The ripstick on their slippers touched down on the catch-surface of the floor, with a rack sound as the miniature plastic hooks and loops engaged. The crew supervisors from the Pathfinder were shepherding their passengers into one of the radial exitways. As they passed the dogged-open pressure door, he had another flash of twisted perspective, and now they were at the bottom of a long well five meters broad, lit by strips, with handholds in regular receding rows. It was lined with close-cropped green vines, part of the air system, and a contribution to the eternal rabbit protein of the spacer’s diet. The joke was that you shouldn’t leave gravity if you couldn’t face rodent.

Or there was fish, of course. Frontier Five had a big watertank, like most industrial-transit stations with a population over a thousand; all you had to do was take a multitonne lump of Lunar silicon and point mirrors at it, inject some gas and continue to heat. Voila, as Maman would say. An aquarium, a convenient heat-sink regulator and fuel store. You could rent a facegill and go swimming there, if you didn’t mind sharing the water with trout and carp . . . the other inevitabilities of life in space . . .

Why am I thinking about this? he asked himself as they passed a junction and caught a main-tube beltway. Cindy snuggled closer as they rode the strip of conveyor. Incoming traffic passed them on the left, and there was another set above. They could see the heads of the passengers whipping by three meters beyond. Because it’s a distraction, that’s why, he thought.

The departure lounge was thronged. Most of the exit docking tubes led to the thrice-daily Luna shuttles, off to the moon settlements of Freetown and Britannia, and New Edo. One of the larger tubes had a rosette of four MPs in Space Force blues hanging around it; they snapped his colonel’s bars a salute, and the three men eyed Cindy with respectful appreciation.

Washington and Simon Bolivar were in, he remembered, downlined with skeletal crews for new thrust plates and repairs to their drive feed systems. The Ethan Allen was up at one of the L-5 battle stations, doing final calibrations on her drive and getting the auxiliary comps burned in; it was policy to keep as much of the deep-space fleet as possible away from Earth. Too many heavy lasers and beam weapons between here and the moon, too many missiles and hardened launchers, too many sensors. A warship needed room to be effective . . .

Another exit, with the circular railing guard and a crewwoman in Trans-American silver. Briefly, his mouth quirked; the early skinsuits had been that color, for insulation. Someone had wanted to call the Space Force the Silver Service, back then, until a tabloid came up with the inevitable “Teapots in Space” headline. The display beside her was flashing: Flight Hermes 17A—Trans-Am Ship Pathfinder—now boarding for Ceres.

“This is it,” he husked.

Cindy stood for a moment, then seized him in a grip that nearly tore him loose from the deck. “I’ll miss you, honey,” she whispered, her forehead pressed into his chest. “Vaya con dios, mi corazon.” Tears drifted loose, glinting like minor jewels; one landed on his lips, tasting of salt.

“I’ll miss you and the tykes, too,” he said, his own voice a little husky. Stepping back, he held her hands for a moment. “Go on then, have them all charmed silly by the time I get to Ceres!” he said.

“Will do, Colonel, sir,” she said, smiling and wiping at her eyes with a tissue. She put a hand on the rail and stepped over, pulling herself down the access tube feet-first to keep him in view a moment longer.

“Shit,” he whispered to himself, as she passed out of sight.

CLAESTUM PLANTATION

DISTRICT OF TUSCANY

PROVINCE OF ITALY

DOMINATION OF THE DRAKA

MAY 7, 1982

“Well, Myfwany,” Yolande began.

The graveyard was empty now, save for the dead and her. Gwen had come, to solemnly lay her handful of wildflowers on the turf; she was down by the bottom of the hill now, playing with Wulda, their new ghouloon. He had been expensive, but her daughter was entranced; she could hear the happy high-pitched shrieks from up here, see the girl-doll tiny with distance and perched on the transgene animal’s shoulders as they romped by the car. For the rest there was silence, and the warm sweet smells of early summer in Italy: clover, wild strawberries from the hedgerows. Bees hummed among the banks of trembling iris that lined the flagstone pathways.

“Gwen’s growin’ like a weed,” Yolande continued quietly. She was kneeling by the headstone, a simple black basalt rectangle with name and dates inlaid in Lunar titanium; she thought Myfwany would have liked that. “And gods, she’s smart. I love her mo’ than I can tell, sweet. Goin’ to be tough and fast like you, but sunnier, I think.”

She paused for a minute. You could see a long way from here, between the trunks of the big oaks and cypresses. Over the vale and the morning mist, past the terraced vineyards to the Great House shining in its gardens, into the blue-green haze of the hills beyond.

“I’m havin’ a baby, by you brother Billy,” she said. “Took Jolene in fo’ the seeding yesterday . . . don’t know exactly why she volunteered, maybe she misses you, too, darlin’.” Suddenly Yolande pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. “Oh, gods, I miss you so! I try, sweet, I try but I’m not strong like you . . . I wish you could tell me what to do.” A shaky laugh, and she lowered her hands. “I know, darlin’ I’m being soppy again like you used to say. Hated hearin’ it then, and now I’d give mah soul to hear you rake me over the coals again. I’ve gotten a new command, though, love.”

She rose to her feet. Her voice whispered. “And I swear, by you blood below my feet, Myfwany, I’ll make them pay fo’ you. Pay, and pay, and pay, and it’ll still never be enough.” Aloud: “Good-bye fo’ now, my love. Till we meet again.”

She turned to walk down the hill; there was the flight to catch. Why don’t I cry? she thought. Never, here. Why?

LOW EARTH ORBIT

NEAR LAUNCH PLATFORM SKYLORD SIX

ABOARD DASCS SUBOTAI

MAY 23, 1982

“ . . . drive systems at one hundred percent,” a voice was saying in the background—the last of the checklist.

Yolande leaned back in the big crashcouch. Only the elastic belts were buckled across her skinsuit; the massive petal-like sections of the combat cocoon had folded back into the sides. The bridge of Subotai was dark, lit mainly by the screens spaced around the perimeter of the eight-meter circle. A dozen stations, horseshoes standing out from the walls with a crashcouch in the center, all occupied. Her own in the center portside of the axial tube, surrounded by sections of console like wedge-shaped portions of a disk. Dozens of separate screens—physical separation rather than virtual, for redundancy’s sake. Light blue and green from data read-outs, pickups, graphs, and schematics.

“Subotai on standby,” said the First Officer, Warden Fermore; she had voyaged with him before.

A screen before her flicked to the face of Philia Garren, captain of the other warship. “Batu on standby,” she said.

“Marius on standby.”

“Sappho on standby.”

“Crassus on standby.”

“Alcibiades, on standby.”

Cargo carriers: the heart of this mission. A substantial proportion of the Domination’s fast heavy-lift capacity, originally built for work around the gas-giant moons. She tapped for an exterior view. The Telmark IV flotilla was stationary a bare kilometer from SkyLord Six and perhaps ten from each other, touching distance in these terms. The armored globe of the launch station swung before her, with the 200-meter tubes of the free-electron lasers around it like the arms of a spider. The other ships . . . Yolande allowed herself a moment of cold pride at the power beneath her fingertips.

“Status, report,” she said. And there was a certain queasy feeling, before any mission. Like having eaten a little too much oily food—and it was worse this time. This time everything was her responsibility . . .

“Time to boost, three minutes and counting,” the First Officer said.

She looked at the other ships. The Batu was a twin of her own. Two hundred and fifty meters from the bell of the thrust plate to the hemisphere dome of the forward shield; most of that machinery space open behind a latticework stretched between the four main keel beams. The heat dumpers, running the length of the keels and the drive lasers; the long bundles that held the plutonium fuel pellets; the jagged asymmetric shapes of rectennae, railgun pods, Gatling turrets, launch tubes. And the cylindrical armored bulk of the reaction-mass tank, with the smaller cylinder of the pressurized crew zone half embedded in it. The transports were blockier, squat, similar propulsion systems but without the weapons, more reaction mass . . . A pulsedrive could run on just the fission reaction and the byproducts, but that was bad for the thrust plates and squanderous of fuel.

All of them clamped to strap-on boost packs, of course. It was not very nice to fire off a pulsedrive just outside the atmosphere; the EMP would destroy electronics over half a continent.

“Cleared for boost, SkyLord Six,” she said

“Guidance lasers locked. All locked. Excitement phase beginning.”

An amplified voice that would sound throughout the flotilla: “STAND BY FOR ACCELERATION. STAND BY FOR ACCELERATION. FIVE THOUSAND SECONDS, MAX AT ONE-POINT-SEVEN-EIGHT G. TEN SECONDS TO BURN. COUNTING.”

She gripped the rests, let the fluid resilience of the couch enfold her. Far behind her back the supercooled oxygen in the strap-on booster would be subliming under the first teasing feathertouch of the station’s lasers. A pulse to vaporize—

Whump. The Subotai massed 14,000 tonnes with full tanks; now that moved with a faint surge, growing as the magnetic equalizers between thrust plate and hull frame absorbed the energy. And another pulse to turn vapor to plasma—

WHAMwhumpWHAM—too fast to sense, building to hundreds of times per second as the lasers flickered. The exterior view showed long leaf-shaped cones of white flame below the strap-ons, and the ships were beginning to move. Weight pressed down on her chest, building; the acceleration would increase as mass diminished. It was nothing compared to flying atmosphere fighters, but it went on much longer . . . 5,000 seconds of bum. Very economical, to save their own onboard reaction mass. It was liquid 0₂ and dirt-cheap here near Luna where the mines produced it as a byproduct; more precious than rubies out where you needed it, at the other end of the trajectory. Even more economical to save on the tiny plutonium-beryllium-plastic pellets that powered a pulsedrive. Full load for a Great Khan cruiser was half a million pellets, which meant six tonnes of plutonium.

The world had been mass-producing breeder reactors for twenty years, to fuel ships like this.

Minutes stretched, and the pressure on her chest increased. She breathed against it, watching the time blinking on half a dozen screens and remembering. Other launches; her first . . . only six years ago? Assistant Pilot Officer, then. Not quite a record for promotion. There had been casualties, and a massive expansion program, and not everyone wanted space assignments . . . Uncle Eric had pulled strings to get Gwen allowed up for the launch, and she had actually been quiet when they showed her the ships through the viewport; there was one who was definitely going to go spacer herself.

The stars were unmoving in the exterior view, but the station was dwindling. Dwindling to a point of light, against the curved shield of Earth; that shrinking to a globe. Other spots of light around it, some things large enough to be seen: station powersails, then a real solar sail half-deployed near a construction station. Ten minutes, and the planet was much smaller. The terminator was sweeping over the eastern Mediterranean. Dusk soon at Claestum. Jolene was there, with Yolande’s child below her heart; she remembered holding the serf’s hand in the Clinic. Pinpoint lights from the darkness over Central Asia, possibly launches from the laserlift stations in the Tien Shan. City lights. Very faint straight lines on the northern and southern edges of the Sahara; one of the few things you could see from this distance were the reclamation projects.

The moon was swelling; they would use it for slingshot effect, about an hour after the burn stopped. Back in . . . ’62, it had been, she remembered how exciting, the first moon landings. Going out with Ma and Pa on the terrace at home, the servants unfolding the 150mm telescope, Ma showing her how to spot the tiny flame. The Yankees ahead—may they rot—but only by a few months. Strange-looking clunky little ships, hand-assembled around those first primitive orbital platforms. A dozen figures in black skinsuits and bubble helmets climbing down the ladders in dreamlike slowness to plant the Drakon banner on the moon; she had stayed up past her bedtime, glued to the viewer, and no one had objected.

“How far we’ve come,” she murmured. Only a single generation. Of course, we had incentive. Ten percent of GNP for decades could accomplish a great deal.

The First Officer responded to her words rather than the meaning. “Making eight kps relative, Cohortarch,” Fermore said. “Twelve hundred seconds of burn to go; then a quick whip ’round and it’s a month to Mars.” Minimum burn, for pulsedrives. And you could pick up reaction mass, at the Draka station on Phobos.

She felt the weight of the sealed data plaque over her breast. Sealed orders, and there were only six others in the flotilla who knew, of more than six hundred; she would tightbeam the course change when they were a week out. A profligate trajectory, since it was necessary to deceive the enemy until the last minute, burning fuel and mass recklessly, but the prize was worth it.

BETWEEN THE ORBITS OF EARTH AND MARS

ABOARD DASCS SUBOTAI

JUNE 18, 1982

The wardroom of the Subotai was small and cluttered; it doubled as an exercise chamber, up here just below the bowcap of the cruiser. They would be a long time in zero-G and the hormone treatments did only so much to slow calcium loss. Just now Yolande and Snappdove had it to themselves, their feet tucked into straps under a table. There was a lingering smell of sweat in the air under the chill freshness the life-support system imposed.

“Your health,” Yolande said, raising her bulb and sipping lemonade through the straw. Flat, but carbonated beverages in zero-G were an invitation to perpetual flatulence. Such are the trials we face pushing back the frontiers of the Race, she thought dryly.

Snappdove’s beard had been clipped closer, for convenience in the helmet ring of his skinsuit. “Our success!” he said, clinking his bulb against hers with a dull tamp of plastic. “Not to mention our wealth.”

“The news good as all that?” Yolande said.

“The core samples are all in now,” the scientist said. “Definitely an ex-comet, somewhat larger and less dense than we thought . . . ah, there is so much we do not know! Always we discover theory-breaking facts faster than we can make plausible theories, out here.” He shook his head ruefully. “Ex-comet, or at least something that came from the outer system, sometime. Complex orbital perturbations, collisions . . . Comet, asteroid—we impose definitions on nature, but nature does not always agree.”

Yolande sighed inwardly. She had not had much time to get to know the head of the expedition’s Technical Section crew—they had only been here five days and he had been madly busy, but it had been enough to know that he was unstoppable. A true natural philosopher, out of time, she thought. The facts entrance him because he can think about them, not necessarily because they’re of any use.

“You have a theory?” she asked.

“Hm-mm. Crude, but . . . several passes into the zone between Earth and Mars resulted in the loss of the outer layer of volatiles, various ices. The process was fairly gentle—I doubt if the object ever came within 1.1 AU of the sun—and the solid material, the organics and silicates, were not thrown off. Instead it formed a protective crust; there must have been a truly unusual amount of such heavier materials. This was through many passes, you understand. Perhaps asteroidal material was incorporated. Now, though, we have a fairly complete crust, there may be some sublimation still, but nothing drastic.” The slight foreign overtone to his accent became stronger as his animation grew. “We will have to be careful; ammonia or methane could still be present.”

“The composition?” she asked, reigning in impatience.

“As favorable as could be hoped!” He spread his hands. “Carbonaceous outer layer, rock and organic compounds. Under that . . . ice! Over a billion tonnes of ice. Dirty ice at that, many complex hydrogenated compounds. And—an additional bonus—rocky core with high concentrations of platinum-group metals. At a guess, the object did encounter asteroidal material. At some time, the ice softened enough that . . . well, never mind.” He chuckled, and parked the drink in the air to rub his palms. “My so-aristocratic colleague, has it occurred to you that we are now very, very rich?”

Yolande blinked. Why no, it hadn’t, she thought. “Point-oh-one percent of the value divided by . . . two hundred and thirty Citizens is that much?” A moment’s pause. “Oh, I see what you means.”

“Yes, indeed. This discovery will power our space-based development for half a decade.”

The commander of the flotilla nodded, mildly pleased. Not that she had ever wanted for money; few Citizens did, and she less than most. Still, it would be pleasant; she was of Landholding family but not landed . . . A land grant was free, but that meant raw territory you had to spend a generation licking into shape. Nothing like the opportunities her parents had had in Europe after the Eurasian War. With enough money you could get one of the rare plantations for sale, or pay for someone else to oversee development. A heritage for her children; and then, it would be useful to have an Archona townhouse . . .

“Can we move it?” she added practically.

“If it is possible, my crew can do it,” Snappdove said with another chuckle. “They are well motivated, even the serfs.”

Glory, she supposed, as well as wealth, for the Citizens. The serfs would get the satisfaction of exercising their specialties; these would be mostly Class V-a Literates already, many crèche-trained for the military. And privileges, apartments, guarantees of education for their children. They would be eager for success, too.

“It is my ambition to get through a project without a single execution,” Snappdove said, echoing her thoughts. “And yes we can move it, I think. Monomolecular coating, reflective to decrease the heat absorption. Single-crystal cable webbing. Then we set up that thrust plate—beautiful piece of work, astounding things they do with cermet composites these days—and it only has to last a month. Then boom! and boom!—we use our bombs. Earth orbit, very eccentric one but the details after that are not our concern.”

She nodded. “Sounds good,” she said. “Very good.”

He sighed happily. “Yes, every year the size of project we can accomplish increases. Geometrically. Did I tell you, we have nearly completed the long-range feasibility study for terraforming Mars?”

Her ears pricked. For a moment, she was back on the dark beach below Baiae School, lying around the campfire and watching the moving stars and dreaming of what they would do. Myfwany . . .

“No,” she said hastily. Gods, how it sneaks up on you, she thought dismally. Work, more work. That’s what I need.

“Oh, yes. We float big mirrors near Mars, melt the icecaps. Much water and C0₂ there. More mirrors, increase the solar heating. Then we blow up Callisto—”

“Wotan and the White Christ!” she blurted. That was one of the major moons of Jupiter. “That’s biggah than Luna!”

He nodded, and ran fingers through his beard. “But ice, only ice; much more than we need for Mars. And there is no limit to how big we may make our bombs. We drop pieces on Mars . . . comets also, if convenient. Already the atmosphere will be thicker and warmer. Water vapor increases the greenhouse effect; tailored bacteria and algae go to work cracking the oxides, the sun splits water vapor. An ozone layer. Nitrogen we get from various places, Titan . . . In a long lifetime, there is breathable air, thinner than Earth, higher percentage of oxygen. Then we build the Beanstalks, and work begins on the ecology; not my field. Many small seas and lakes, about half the surface.”

His eyes stared out beyond the bulkhead. “And then we bring in serfs to till the fields . . . strange, is it not?”

“No,” she said frankly. “Should it be?” For a moment she imagined condors nesting on the slopes of Martian canyons longer than continents, forests five hundred meters tall . . .

He snorted. “A matter of perspective. Me, I will buy an estate in perhaps South China, for my children. And a block in the Trans-Solar Combine, they have contracts in the project.” Another shrug of the massive shoulders. “All this is moot. We must finish with the Alliance, first.”

Yolande grinned. It was a much less pleasant expression than the intellectual interest of a moment before. “To business, then. Can you get me retanked on reaction mass? I ran it down somethin’ fierce, matchin’ velocities here.”

“Oh, yes. Trivial. Do you wish water or liquid oxygen?”

“Hmm. No, we’re rigged fo’ 0₂, we’ll go with that. How long?”

“Two days for your ship, and one to rig the stills. A week for the rest of the fleet.”

“Do it, then. First priority. We need the intelligence data on that Yankee ship.” And an installment payment on the debt they owe me, she thought. A small, small payment on a very large account.

* * *

ABOARD TRANS-AMERICAN SHIP PATHFINDER

EARTH-CERES

JUNE 12, 1982

The lounge of the Pathfinder had acquired a certain homeyness in the month and a half of transit, Cindy decided. It was on the second-highest of the eight decks in the pressure section, a semicircle on one side of the core tube, across from the galley and stores. One corner was posted with drawings and projects; she and several of the other mothers held classes for the children there, around the terminal they had appropriated. Young Alishia Merkowitz showed real talent in biology; she really should talk to the girl’s parents . . . There was a big viewer, but the passengers generally only screened movies or documentaries; the sort who moved to the Belt didn’t go in for passive entertainment.

There was a group mastering the delicate art of zero-G darts, another arguing politics. The coffee machine was going, scenting the air; it looked odd, but you did have to push the water through here. A courting couple were perched by the sole exterior viewport, but they were holding hands, oblivious to the spectacle of the stars. Two young men were building a model habitat from bits of plastic—scarcely a hobby, they were engineers and had a terminal beside them for references. She could catch snatches of their conversation: “ . . . no, no, you don’t have to use a frame and plating! Just boil out the silicates, inject water, heat and spin and the outer shell will . . . ”

Dr. Takashi moved his piece. Cindy Guzman Lefarge started and returned her attention to the go board.

“Oh, lordy, Doctor,” she said. “You’re never going to make a go player of me.”

“You show native talent,” he said, considering the board. It was electronic, and they were using light-pencils to move the pieces; the traditional stones were a floating nuisance in space.

“I’m surprised you don’t play the captain,” she said, frowning. A quarter of her pieces were gone . . . which still left her with more than her opponent, who had started with a substantial handicap. But far too many were nearly surrounded.

“Ah.” He smiled; Professor of Cybernetic Systems Analysis Manfred Takashi was a slim man, fifty, with dark-brown skin and short wiry hair. “Captain Hayakawa is impeccably polite, but I doubt that he would welcome social contact. Not from me.”

Cindy raised her brows. “Well, he is fairly reserved. I would have thought, though, you being Japanese—”

The professor laughed. “Half Japanese, my dear Mrs. Lefarge, half Japanese. Even worse, half black.”

The woman winced, embarrassed. Overt racial prejudice was rare these days in the cities of North America, even more so in space. Of course, some of the family in the South Carolina low country were still unhappy about her mother’s marriage to a Maya from Yucatan, even a much-decorated naval veteran of the Pacific campaigns back in the Eurasian War.

“Actually,” the man continued, “it is an interesting change. In Hawaii it was the Japanese side of my heritage which created problems.”

She nodded. The Imperial occupation in the early ’40s had been brutal, and the angers had taken a long time to dissipate. Even now some of the older generation found it difficult to accept how important Japan had become in the councils of the Alliance.

“You must be eager to get to work, on”—she lowered her voice—“the Project.” Best to change the subject.

“Indeed.” He turned the light-pencil in his hands. “I—”

Tchannnng. The sound went through the hull, like an enormous steel bucket struck with a fingernail. Conversation died, and the passengers looked up.

“Attention!” the captain’s voice. “We have suffered a meteorite impact. There is no danger; the hull was not breached. I repeat, there is no danger. All passengers will please return to their cabins until further notice.”

“I must get back to Janet and Iris,” Cindy said, rising briskly. She forced down a bubble of anxiety; a meteor strike was very rare—odd that the close-in radars had not detected it. “Continue the game after dinner, Doctor?”

“I hope so,” he said quietly, folding the board as he stood. “I sincerely hope so.”

“Distance and bearing,” Yolande said.

“One hundred k-klicks, closing at point-one kps relative,” the sensor officer said.

Yolande could feel the strait tension in the ship, a taste like ozone in the air. A week’s travel. Overcrowded, since she had dropped off most of the ship’s Auxiliaries who handled routine maintenance and taken on another score of Citizen crew from Batu. The main problem with Draka was keeping them from ripping at each other. Constant drill in the arcane art of zero-G combat had helped. And now action. Not that the pathetic plasma-drive soupcan out there was any menace to a cruiser, but they had to capture, not destroy. Much more difficult.

“Bring up the schematic,” she said. They would not detect the Subotai for a while yet; her stealthing was constructed to deceive military sensors.

Two screens to her left blanked and then showed 360-degree views of the Alliance vessel, Pathfinder. A ferrous-alloy barrel, basically, the aft section holding a reaction-mass tank and a simple engine. An arc broke the mass into plasma, and magnetic coils accelerated it out the nozzle, power from solar receptors or a big storage coil. Thrown out of Earth orbit much as the Subotai had been, then additional boost from a solar sail. That was still deployed, square kilometers of .05-micron aluminum foil, rigged on lines of sapphire filament; but soon they would furl it and begin velocity matching for Ceres. A long slow burn; plasma drives were efficient but low-thrust.

Would have begun their burn, she corrected herself. It was odd, how vengeance always felt better beforehand than after . . . Sternly, she pushed down weakness. There was a duty to the Race here, and to her dead. If she was too fainthearted to long for it, then nobody else need know.

Yolande reached out a hand; that was all that could move, with the cradle extended and locked about her. The couch turned on its heavy circular base to put her hand over the controls. The schematic altered: command and communication circuits outlined in color-coded light. Provided this is up-to-date—

“When’s their next check-in call?’ she said.

“Five minutes.”

There were no Alliance warships nearby or in favorable launch windows, but it was important not to give them more warning time than was needful. She wanted to have Subotai back with the flotilla long before anything could arrive; this was direct provocation, and it could escalate into anything up to a minor fleet action. Probably not. Still . . .

Her fingers played across the controls. “Here. See this rectenna? Throw a rock at it first. Time it to arrive just after they report everything normal.”

“Making it so,” the Weapons Officer said, keying. “Careless of them, all the com routed though that dish.” A low chuckle from some of the nearer workstations.

“They like to mass-produce,” Yolande said. A light blinked on one of her monitor screens, echoing the Weapons Officer’s. On the outer hull a long thin pod would be swiveling.

“Monitoring call,” the Sensor Officer said. “Standard garbage, messages to relatives.” She paused. “Coded blip. Recordin’ fo’ future reference.” A minute passed. “End message.”

“Fire,” Yolande said. A cold-flame feeling settled beneath her breastbone. The first attack on Alliance civilians since the Belt clashes.

The light blinked red. “Away,” the Weapons Officer said. In the pod, two charged rails slammed together. A fifty-gram slug rode the pulse of electromagnetic force, accelerated to ninety kilometers per second. “Hit.” The target would have vanished in a puff of vapor and fragments.

“No transmission from target, monitoring internal systems.”

“With all due respect to ouah colleagues of the Directorate of Security,” Yolande said, “I’m not takin’ any chances that they got the plans exactly right. We’ll cripple her first on a quick fly-by, then get within kissin’ range. Drive, prepare fo’ boost; pass at one kps relative, then decelerate an’ match at five klicks. Weapons, cut the sail loose, hole the control compartment, wreck the drive.” A plasma jet could be a nasty weapon in determined hands. “Cut the connections to the main power coil.” There were megawatts stored in that, and if it went nonsuperconducting all of it would be converted to heat—rapidly. “Then we’ll see.”

“Odd they don’ have no suicide bomb,” the assistant weapons officer said, as she and her superior worked their controls.

“Too gutless,” the man replied. “Ready to execute.”

“Drive ready to execute.”

“Make it so,” Yolande said.

The speakers roared: “PREPARE FOR ACCELERATION. ALL HANDS SECURE FOR ACCELERATION. TEN-SECOND BURN. FIVE SECONDS TO BURN. COUNTING.”

Somewhere deep within the Subotai pumps whirred. Precisely aligned railguns charged as fuel pellets were stripped from the magazines, ten-gram bundles of plutonium-239 and their reflector-absorber coatings.

“BURN.”

The pellets flicked out behind the cruiser. Her lasers struck and the coating sublimed explosively, squeezing. Fission flame loomed, flickering at ten times per second. Nozzles slammed liquid oxygen into the carbon-carbon lined hemisphere of the thrust plate to meet the fire, and the gas exploded into plasma. The superconductor field coils in the plate swept out magnetic fingers, cupping and guiding the blaze of charged particles into a sword of light and energy, stripping out power for the next pulse. The thrust plate surged forward against its magnetic buffers. And the multithousand-tonne mass of the warship moved.

“Burn normal. Flow normal at fifty-seven-percent capacity. Point-nine-eight G.”

“Comin’ up on target. Closin’. Preparin’ fo’ fire mission. Execute.”

Needles of coherent light raked across the lines that held the sail to the Pathfinder. The single-crystal sapphire filaments sublimed and parted in tiny puffs of vapor, but no change showed in the giant bedsheet of the sail; it would be hours before the vast slow pressure of the photon wind made a noticeable difference. It was otherwise with the Pathfinder itself. A dozen railgun slugs sleeted through the control chamber, and the steel-alloy outer hull rang like a tin roof under hail. The missiles punched through and out the other side without slowing perceptibly, leaving plate-sized holes; the edges shone red as air rushed past, turning to a mist of crystals that glittered in the unwavering light of the sun. Light flickered briefly within as systems shorted and arced.

Other slugs impacted the nozzle of the plasma drive, turning the titanium alloy to twisted shards. A finger of neutral particles stabbed, cut across the lines that connected the arc to the main power torus. Pathfinder tumbled.

“STAND BY FOR ZERO GRAVITY.” The subliminal thuttering roar of the drive ceased, leaving only the quiet drone of the ventilators. “STAND BY FOR MANEUVER.” Attitude jets slammed with twisting force, and the cruiser switched end for end. “STAND BY FOR ACCELERATION. EIGHTEEN-SECOND BURN. THREE SECONDS TO BURN. BURN.” Longer and harder this time; they were killing part of their initial speed and matching trajectories as well. The sound was duller, more mass going onto the thrust plate.

“Matched, closin’,” the Drive Officer said. The attitude jets fired again, briefly. “Stable in matchin’ orbit, five-point-two klicks.”

Yolande keyed the exterior visual display, switching to a magnification that put her at an apparent ten meters from the Alliance vessel. “Well done,” she said to the bridge; it looked precisely as she had specified. “Ah.” Flames were stabbing out from parts of the can-shaped transport, and the tumbling slowed and stopped. “Nice of him.” She hit the control, and the combat braces folded away from her with a sigh of hydraulics. “Number One, boardin’ party to the forward lock. Sensors?”

“She’s dead in space, apart from those attitude jets. Internal pressure normal except on the control deck; that’s vacuum. Doan’ think much damage to internal systems.”

“Weapons, connectors away.”

“Makin’ it so. Off.”

Two of her screens slaved to the Weapons station showed a rushing telemetered view of the enemy vessel, as the tiny rockets carried the connectors. Their heads held pickups and sundry other equipment; mostly, they were very powerful electromagnets. The cables themselves were no mere ropes: optical fibers, superconductor power lines, ultrapure metal and boron and carbon, armored sheathing, the whole strong enough to support many times the cruiser’s weight in a one-G field.

“Ah, human-level heat sources in the control chamber. Three, suited. Multiple elsewhere in the hull.”

“Very well,” Yolande said. “Maintain position, prepare to grapple when the target’s secured.” That was doctrine, and only sensible. The Subotai and her crew represented an unthinkable investment of the resources of the Race.

She rose, secured her boots to the floor. “Number Two, carry on. Boardin’ party, I’ll be with you shortly.”

Janet had been squealing with excitement when Cindy returned to the cabin, Iris solemn and earnestly trying to remember what she had been told about emergency drills. It was still hard to believe, how different twins were; or how complete and yet alien a personality could be at five . . .

Then they both quieted, sensing her seriousness. She zipped them quickly into their skinsuits; Fred had paid out-of-pocket for those luxuries, rather than rely on bubble cocoons, and now she blessed the extravagance as she worked her way into her own. These were civilian models, little changed from the original porous-plastic leotards the first astronauts had worn. The fabric was cool and tight against her flesh, with a little chafing at groin and armpits where the pads completed the seal. She helped her daughters on with the backpacks, then checked her own; the helmets could be left off but close to hand, for now. God forbid they should have to use them, but if they did every minute could count.

“Come on, punkins,” she said, guiding them to the pallet that occupied most of the sternside wall of their cubicle and strapping them in. “Mommy’s going to tell you a story.”

They settled in on either side of her; she had just begun to search her memory when the sound came. A monstrous ringing hail, like trip hammers in a forging mill, toning through the metal beneath and around them, like being inside a bell. The Pathfinder was seized and wrenched, the unfamiliar sensation of weight pulling at them from a dozen different directions, inside a steel shell sent bounding downhill. The locking bolts on the door shot home with a metallic clangor and even over the ringing of the hull she could hear the wailing of the alarm klaxon and the slamming of airtight doors throughout the ship. Her skin prickled.

“Mom! Mommeee!” Janet shrieked. Iris had gone chalk-pale, her eyes full circles, and her panting was rapid and breathy.

“Meteor swarm, O sweet mercy of God, let it be a meteor swarm!” she whispered under her breath. Their stateroom was the first-class model, with a porthole. The light that stabbed through it into her eyes was like mocking laughter; there was only one thing in the human universe that made that actinic blue-white light, that spearhead-shaped scar across the stars. A nuclear pulsedrive.

“Shhh, shhh, Mommy’s here, darlings.” She used hands and voice and quieted them to whimpering by the time the reaction jets fired and the ship shuddered back to stability. Just in time, she found a moment to think. I’m feeling sick and Iris looks green. They were all on antinausea drugs, and it took some powerful tinkering with the inner ear to override those.

The Pathfinder drifted and steadied. Cindy looked out the port again, blinking against the afterimage of fire that strobed across her sight, against the tears of pain. Then she jammed her knuckles into her mouth and bit down, welcoming pain to beat down the stab of desperation, the whining sound that threatened to break free of her throat. The shape that drifted model-tiny there was familiar, very familiar from the lectures she had attended before signing on with the Project—she was the Commandant’s wife as well as a biologist. A Draka cruiser, the third-generation type. A Great Khan, and the only things in the solar system which could match it were a month’s journey away.

Cindy Lefarge felt the world graying away from the corners of her eyes, a rippling on her shin as the hairs struggled to stand erect. Bile shot into the back of her throat, acrid and stinging as she remembered other things from those lectures. No. A voice spoke in the back of her mind, a voice like her grandmother’s. Y’ got yore duty, gal, so do it! She had the children to protect.

“Jannie, Iris, listen to me.” The small faces turned toward her, pale blue eyes and freckles and the floating wisps of black hair. “You girls are going to have to be very brave for Mommy. Just like real grown-up people, so Daddy will be proud of you. This is really, really important, you understand?”

They looked up from where her arms cradled them against her shoulders. Iris nodded, swallowing and clenching trembling lips. Janet bobbed her head vigorously. “You bet, Mom,” she said. “I’m gonna be a soldier like Dad, someday. So I gotta be brave, right?”

She pulled them closer. Twin lights sparkled from the Draka cruiser, seeming to drift toward her and then rush apart in a V. She closed her eyes, waiting for the final wash of nuclear flame, but all that came was two deep-toned chunnng sounds. The Pathfinder jerked again, rotating so that the Domination warship was out of her view. The overhead speaker came to life with a series of gurgles and squawks, then settled into the voice of Captain Hayakawa; calm as ever, but a little tinny, as if he was speaking from inside a skinsuit helmet.

“Attention, please. We have been attacked by a Draka deep-space warship. The engines have been disabled, our communications are down, and the sail has been cut loose. The main passenger compartment has not been holed, I repeat, not been holed. Please remain calm, and stay in your cabins. This is the safest place for all civilians at the moment. Ceres and Earth will soon detect what has happened and SKREEKKKKAAWWK-” The noise built to an ear-hurting squeal and then died.

Cindy Guzman Lefarge bent her head over those of her children and prayed.

“Assault party ready,” the Centurion from Batu said.

Yolande nodded assent as she secured the straps on the last of her body armor. It was fairly light (weight didn’t matter here but mass certainly did), segmented sandwiches of ablative antiradar, optically perfect flexmirror, sapphire thread, synthetics. Not quite as much protection as the massive cermet stuff heavy infantry wore on dirtside, but easier to handle. She settled the helmet on her shoulders, checked the seal to the neck ring, and swiveled her eyes to read the various displays. She could slave them to the pickups in any warrior’s pack, call up information—the usual data overload.

The boarding commandos were grouped in Hangar B, the portside half of the chamber just below the nosecap of the cruiser. The Great Khans carried one eighty-tonne auxiliary, but it was stored in vacuum on the starboard, leaving B free as a workspace where systems could be brought up and overhauled in shirt-sleeve conditions. Both hangars connected with the big axial workway that ran through the center of the vessel right down to the thrust equalizers, nine-tenths the length of the ship. Now this one was crowded with the score of Draka who would put this particular piece of Yankeedom under the Yoke.

Her lips drew back behind the visor, and she slid her hand into the sleeve of the reaction gun clipped to her thigh. A faint translucent red bead sprang into being on the inside of her faceplate as she wrapped her fingers around the pistol grip, framed by aiming lines. The bulk of the chunky weapon lay rightside on her arm, connected to her backpack by an armored conduit. It was dual-purpose: a jet for short-range maneuvering and a weapon that fired glass-tungsten bullets and balanced them with a shower of plastic confetti backwards.

“Right,” she said, over the command push. “Listen, people.” There were certain things that had to be repeated, even with Citizen troops. “This is a raid; we want intelligence data, not bodies or loot. Go in, immobilize whoever you find, get theys up to the big compartment just rearward of the control deck. Then we’ll sweep up everythin’ of interest, and get out. Make it fast, make it clean, do not kill anyone lessen you have to, do not waste any time. Service to the State!”

“Glory to the Race!”

“Execute.” There was a prickling feeling all over her skin as the pressure in the hangar dropped; nothing between her flesh and vacuum but the layer of elastic material that kept her blood from boiling—except the woven superconductor radiation shield and the armor and the thermal layer and—oh, shut up, Yolande, she told herself. An eagerness awoke, like having her hands on the controls of a fighter back in the old days.

The pads inside her suit inflated. Combat-feeling: a little like being horny, a little like nausea, a lot like wanting to piss. The surroundings took on the bleak sharpness of vacuum, but she knew the unnatural clarity would be there even if there was air. Donar, I could have the suit monitor my bloodstream and tell me how hopped-up I am, she thought.

The Centurion’s voice. “By lochoi!”

Hers was first. “Follow me,” she said, taking a long shallow dive through the hangar door. Out into the access tunnel, three meters across, a geometric tube of blue striplights and handholds two hundred meters sternward of her feet. She pointed her reaction gun toward the open docking ring over her head and pressed once. Heated gas pulsed backward; she stopped herself with a reverse jolt at the exit and swung around to face the enemy ship, adjusting perception until it was below her. The dark, slug-dented surface of the control deck swam before her eyes, jiggling with the distance and magnification. She fixed the red aiming spot on the surface and reached across to key the reaction gun.

Locked strobed across her vision. “Slave your rgs to mine,” she told the others, crouching. It would adjust the thrust nozzle to compensate for any movement short of turning ninety degrees out of line, now. Yolande took a deep breath. “Let’s—go.”

The hull of the Alliance ship thunked dully under their boots, sound vibrating up her bones for lack of air.

“Let’s take a look,” she said.

“Yo.” A crewman slid a long limber rod through one of the impact holes.

She called up a miniature rectangle of vision keyed to the fiber-optic periscope, fisheye distorted but it would do. Dark, with the chilly silver look of light enhancement. A drifting corpse, legs missing at the knee where flesh and skinsuit had fought a hypervelocity missile and lost badly. Grains of freeze-dried blood still drifted brown nearby. Wrecked equipment, a very elementary-looking control system, none of the fabled Alliance high technology. Of course, they want to build these cheap and quick, she thought. The Domination had no equivalent class of vessel; the closest were unmanned freighters. The Draka economy did not produce the same set of incentives as the Alliance’s nearly laissez-faire system.

“Patch to their com,” she said. A sound of voices in some Asian-sounding language; well, everybody who could have gotten a ship command would speak English. “Y’all in there,” she said. “Surrender. Last chance.”

Silence. She shrugged, looked up at the warrior who was preparing their entranceway, made a hand signal. That one finished drawing the applicator around the shallow dome of the spacecraft’s nose.

It had left a thick trail of something that looked very much like mint toothpaste.

“Secure.” They backed off, tagged lines to protuberances on the surface. The Pathfinder was built smooth-hulled because that eased fabrication, but there were fittings aplenty. “On the three.”

“One. Two. Three.”

A flash of soundless light, and the hull flexed slightly to push her up to the limit of the line. Then the cap of steel was floating away, dark against the mirror-bright surface of the sail; it would strike it, before the film could sweep away on the breeze from the Sun. The warrior nearest the giant circular hole freed a grenade from her belt and tossed it in, a flat straight line like nothing that could be done planetside. There was another pulse of light.

“Storm!” Yolande shouted, and the Draka slid forward, throwing themselves into the hole.

Thung. Yolande twirled in midleap to land feet first on the deck. A figure in a foil-covered skinsuit was thrashing, ripped by the shards from the grenade; his blood sprayed out, and she could see the scream behind his transparent bubble helmet. Her eyes skipped, jittering. Another Alliance suit, rising from behind a spindly crashcouch, something gripped in both hands. The red dot pivoted toward him, but before she could fire the man’s torso exploded in a corona of red and pinkish white. The bullets from a reaction gun were tungsten monofilament in a glass sabot; they punched through hard targets, but underwent explosive deformation in soft.

“Shit,” she swore, seeing the rank-tabs on the man’s shoulders. “That was the captain.” Yolande batted a lump of floating something away from her faceplate with a grimace; zero-G combat was messy. Two others were zipping the wounded man into an airbag and doing what crude first aid they could.

“Labushange, Melder, stay here. Pull the compcore and see if y’ can patch through to log memory. Anderson, take the door.” That was a hatch in the middle of the floor. “Pressure-lock it.”

The warrior knelt and focused on the door, calling up a schematic to show the vulnerable spots in his faceplate. Two others peeled the covering off the base ring of a plastic tent and slapped it adhesive-down on the deck around the hatch. The lochos stepped inside, zipping it over their heads.

“Got it,” Anderson grunted. “Ready?”

“Go,” she snapped.

He locked his boots to the deck and pointed the gauntlet gun. It flashed twice, and translucent confetti drifted back to join the particles already rising out of the hole above their head, mixed with a haze of blood. The deck sparked with impact and glittered with a new plating of molten glass, and there was the blue flicker of discharge. Yolande kicked the lockbar of the door; it slammed down with blurring speed, and air roared in to bulge the tent over their heads.

“Bulala!” she shrieked, and dove through the opening into light.

* * *

“Shhh,” Cindy said again.

There had been sounds, clanging, shouts, screams, a sharp ptank-tank rapping she could not identify, even pistol shots. I wish I had taken the gun, she thought desperately. She had had the usual personal-defense training in school, though her National Service had been in the research branch; even the worn old high school submachine gun would have been something . . .

Probably just enough to get us all killed, she thought bleakly. Even worse was the knowledge that that might be the best thing.

The locking bar of the door moved a half-inch back and forth. She started, then unstrapped the children and pushed them back into the farthest corner of the cabin, bracing herself in front of them with her arms across the angle of the wall. There was silence for a second, then a bright needle of flame spat from beside the door. It swung open; she had a brief glimpse of the boot that kicked it, before a thin black stick poked in. A figure bounced through two seconds afterward and stopped itself with one expert footblow against the far wall. The fluted muzzle of a weapon fastened to the right arm pointed at her; she crowded her daughters farther behind her body.

Another head came through the doorway, then a body likewise strapped around with pieces of equipment. They were both in skinsuits and some sort of flexible armor that was a dull matte black, but a line of silver brightness showed along a scratch on one’s chest. She swallowed through a mouth the consistency of dry rice paper and tried to keep her face from twisting. Then they unlatched their helmets and pushed them back against their backpacks.

The first Draka she had ever seen in the flesh. For a moment she was surprised that they looked so much like the pictures. These two were both men, young, hair cropped close at the sides and slightly longer on top. One had a stud earring, the other a rayed sunburst painted about an eye—hard faces, scarcely affected by the usual zero-G puffiness, all slabs and angles, almost gaunt. The first one spoke, in a purring drawl hurtfully reminiscent of her mother’s . . . No, more archaic sounding, with a guttural undertone.

“All cleah.” That into the thread-and-dot microphone that curved up from the neck ring of his suit. “Yes, suh, these’re the last. We’ll get ’em secured an’ up to the lounge.”

“You,” he said. “Out of the skinsuit. The picknins, too.”

The words flowed over her mind without meaning. Can’t be, can’t be, was sounding somewhere inside her. Bad movie.

“Shit,” the man said in a tired voice; it sounded more like “shaay’t.” He reached across to do something to the weapon, and a red dot sprang out on the wall beside her head. It settled on her forehead for a moment, then shifted to the outer surface.

Bang-ptank! A hole the breadth of her thumb flashed into existence in the steel, and there was a shower of something flakey and glittering from behind his elbow. A brief whistling of air, before the self-sealing layer in the hull blocked it off. The red dot settled between her eyes again.

“To t’ count a’ three, wench: One. Two—”

Trembling slightly, her hands went to the seals of her suit, then hesitated. My god, I’m only wearing briefs under this. The Draka made a gesture of savage impatience, and she stripped out of the clinging elastomer. “Help the picknin,” he snapped.

“Come on, punkins,” she said. The girls were staring enormous-eyed at the two Draka; Iris’s lips were caught between her teeth as she fought rhythmically against her sobs. “We have to do what the man says.”

“Mom!” Janet said, scandalized. “Those—those are strangers!”

The red dot settled on her daughter’s face. Shoulder blades crawling, Cindy put herself between the gun and Janet, taking her by the shoulders and shaking her. “Come on, you silly girl,” she forced herself to say, harshly. “Quickly.”

The Draka in the doorway held up what looked like a medical injector. “Docilize?” he said to the other.

“Na, quicker if we let her handle the sprats,” he said. “Don’ have time to fuck around.” He looked at her, up and down, and grinned. “Pity. Maybe latah.” Reached out, quite casually, and grabbed her crotch.

Cindy closed her eyes and gritted teeth. Then something windmilled by her and struck the Draka with a thump. It was Janet.

“You bad man! Leggo my mom! Leggo!” The five-year-old was clinging to the man’s harness with one hand and trying earnestly to punch him with the other, while her feet flailed at his stomach. “You let go, or I’ll kill you!” Iris started to scream, shrill high-pitched sounds like an animal in a trap.

The Draka snarled, rearing his head back and raising the arm with the gun to club at Janet. Cindy felt a great calm descend as she readied herself; reach down and immobilize the left hand, strike up with the palm under his nose . . .

A hand snaked in with the injector and pressed it against Janet’s side. It hissed, and the girl slumped; not unconscious, just drifting with her eyes half-closed. The Draka with the drug gun laughed and reached around her to plant the muzzle against Iris’s neck.

“Dociline,” he said to her as the screaming stopped. “Trank. Haa’mless.” To his companion: “Let’s get on with it.”

She huddled back with her children as they ransacked the cabin, giving the comfort of skin against skin that was all she had to offer. The two warriors went systematically through the tiny closet and the bulkhead containers. Cindy noticed what they took: books, letters, data plaques, her new Persimmon 5 portable perscomp that Fred had got from the PX, all stuffed into a transparent holder. One of them came across her jewelry, but that went into a pouch at his belt.

“Right,” the one with the face painting said when they had finished. “You. Hold out y’arms. Togethah.” A loop went around her elbows, painfully tight; she could use her hands, but awkwardly. “Now, listen good. You take the picknins, an’ we’re goin’ up to the top level. An’ wench—any trouble an’ we kill you spawn. Understand?” She gave a tight nod. “Go.”

Cindy gathered her daughters with slow care; they had curled into fetal positions floating near her, and it would be easy to bruise them if she moved too quickly. She kicked her feet into the ripstick slippers on the floor and began to step out into the corridor. The man who had groped her earlier reached out one hand and stripped the briefs off her with a wrench as she went by. “Later,” he said.

“Is that the last of them?” Yolande asked, as the woman steered the two children into the lounge.

“Yes, ma’am,” the Centurion said. “ ’Cept fo’ the one who gave us trouble.”

“Number Two,” she said, “target secured. Reel her in an’ run a tube over to the airlock on this level.”

“Makin’ it so, Cohortarch. Twenty seconds to commencement.”

“Silence!” she called to the crowd of prisoners through the exterior speaker on her helmet. “Everybody brace themselfs.”

There were about eighty of them, milling about at the far end of the grubby lounge. Most had been wearing skinsuits, and so were nearly stripped; she looked at them with disgust. This is the enemy? Flabby, soft-gutted rubbish, she thought. A few had been docilized. Those thumped painfully against the wall when the ship lurched again, and so did a few of the fully conscious ones. Sheep. There was an almost imperceptible feeling of sideways acceleration for a few minutes, and then the cables went slack; the Subotai would be backing off with her attitude jets, to reestablish zero relative motion.

“Line them up,” she continued.

Her troopers moved in, prodding with their gauntlet guns. A moment of trouble from two young men, stocky-muscular; they looked like they played—what was that absurd Yankee sport? Football? A flurry of dull thudding sounds and they were against the wall with the others, one clutching his groin, the other a flattened nose that leaked blood in drifting red globules. Three more figures floated up through the central batch. A wounded Draka with a long cut through the belly section of her armor, hands to a pad over the wound, helped by a comrade. Then a prisoner trussed hand and foot. Hand and elbows, rather; one forearm ended in a frayed stump covered in glistening sprayseal, typical gauntlet-gun wound.

“What happened with him?” the Centurion asked.

“Had a fukkin’ sword,” the wounded Draka said, between clenched teeth. Soft impact armor gave excellent protection against projectiles, but very little against something sharp and low-velocity. “Under his pallet covers. I blew his hand off on the backswing.”

“Careless,” the Centurion said. There were clanging noises and voices from the background, as the tube was secured and the airlock opened on the temporary seal between the two vessels. “McReady, get her back to sickbay. Bring up the rest of the bodies.”

Yolande reached up to remove her helmet, wrinkling her nose at the proof that some of the prisoners had lost control of their bowels. She looked at the one-handed man. Black-Asian, she guessed, about fifty. Wiry and strong, stone-faced under her gaze. Shock, part of that calm, but that was one with a hard soul. It would not do to underestimate them all; few of the Alliance peoples were natural warriors, but they could learn, and the Americans in particular had a damnable trader’s cunning that made them capable of all manner of surprises. I wish they hadn’t brought the picknins. She pushed the children’s sobbing below the surface of her mind. Now—

Cindy forced herself to take her eyes off the raw stump of Professor Takashi’s hand. She tried to imagine what that would feel like, failed, raised her eyes to his face. He was smiling; that was almost as shocking as the wound.

The Draka commander was removing her helmet. A woman, she saw without surprise. The face was huge-eyed, triangular, delicately feminine, haloed in short platinum-colored hair. Then the eyes met hers, and she shivered slightly.

“This one?” the Draka said, to the man holding Takashi.

“Cybernetic Systems Analysis,” the guard said.

“Lucky fo’ us you didn’t get killed,” the woman said genially.

The dark man shook his head, smiling more broadly. “Not so—ah!” he shook once, slumped. The guard cursed, felt for his pulse.

“Dead,” he spat. “Must’ve taken something.”

The commander turned back toward the prisoners. “Listen,” she said, and all fidgeting died away. The voice was deliberately pitched rather low, so that they would have to strain to hear it; it was soft, naturally light, Cindy thought.

“Yo will, starting at the right, go one by one to that table.” She pointed to one where a group of Draka were going through the identity documents of the passengers. “You will state you name and profession, and answer all other questions. Then go back to that end of the line. Understood, serfs?”

There was a rustling, and they glanced at each other. The Draka waited for a moment, then continued in a tone of weary distaste.

“Stubborn. Fools. All right . . . Who’s a Yankee heah? I have a special and particular dislike of Yankees.” The big eyes slid down the line. Gray, with a rim of blue. Colder than any I’ve ever seen, Cindy thought. She could almost have preferred a sadist’s glazed sickness; it would be less intelligent.

The eyes settled on the Merkowitz family. A gloved finger pointed. “They two slugs look repulsive enough to be Yankees. Fetch me the pretty little bull beside them, an’ make a steer of him.”

A dozen of the Draka had been hanging ready by the opposite wall. Two crouched and sprang, blurring across the lounge, twisting end-for-end and landing one on either side of young David Merkowitz with balletic gracefulness; they grabbed his arms and leaped again, releasing him just before they touched down. The warriors let their legs cushion impact like springs, coiling; the teenager from Newark landed against the wall with a soggy impact. Stunned, he floated for an instant until they spreadeagled him on a table. Others moved in to hold and secure; one of the Draka reached over her shoulder and drew something as long as her forearm.

Cindy felt a glassy sense of unreality as she recognized the tool. It was a cutter bar, a thin film of vacuum-deposited diamond between two layers of crystal iron-chrome. Alliance models had the same backward-sloping saw teeth, although they did not come to the sort of wicked point this one did. The Draka spun the tool in the air, a blurring circle, then reached in. The hilt slapped into her palm—bravado; that edge would go through fingers as if they were boiled carrots. She raised it in mocking salute to the prisoners and swaggered over to the boy; one of those holding him had stuffed a cloth into his mouth to muffle his screams, and was holding up his head so that he could not help but see.

The Draka with the cutter bar paused, turned, slashed the edge down on a metal table frame. The steel tube parted with a ringing sound, and the woman smiled. She smiled more broadly as she pulled off the undersuit briefs, wet one finger and drew it up young Merkowitz’s scrotum and penis. He convulsed and made a sound that was astonishingly loud; she gripped the testicles in her left and raised the knife with taunting slowness.

“No.” That from the man at the head of the line. He moved forward toward the table with the interrogators. Cindy looked at the Draka commander, who had been hanging relaxed, smoking a cigarette and looking up at the ceiling; the American saw a slight tension go out of the enemy commander’s shoulders.

“Very well,” the short blond woman said. “Hold it there, cut him if any of the rest make trouble.” The Draka with the cutter bar lowered the weapon and waited, loose but alert as she faced the prisoners. Her other hand stayed on the teenager, stroking lightly. He began to weep.

“Name.”

Yolande looked aside at the prisoner. A wench in her late twenties, with two picknins floating near; the children had been shot with dociline and were just coming to, still muzzy and vague. She was ruddy-olive, quite good looking in a slimmish sort of way, spirited from the calm tone she used, which was a relief. The sniveling from some of the others had been nauseating, even for feral serfs—especially when you considered that she had not done anything of note to them yet. Not that this whole business was very pleasant, at all; necessary, but distasteful. Find it easier to kill them from a distance, eh? she thought, mocking herself. To desire the end is to desire the means.

“Cynthia Guzman Lefarge,” the wench was saying. She was the last of them. “My daughters Janet Mary and Iris Dawn. Master’s degree in Applied Biosystems from the University of Anahuac in Mexico City. Going out to meet my husband on Ceres; that’s his picture there.”

Yolande looked at the timer display on the sleeve of her suit. Less than an hour from boarding, good time. A disappointment that the compcore had been slagged, but only to be expected. Still . . . She looked down at the picture in the booklet.

“Wait.” Her hand slashed down. Impossible. She could feel herself start to shake as she looked at it. Impossible. With an effort greater than any she could recall, she took a deep breath. One. Another. The shaking receded to an almost imperceptible tremor in her fingers as she lifted the record book. Square face. Dark eyes. Dress uniform, not the mottled night fatigues. Same face, the same face, the Indian night and its hot scents, the smell of Myfwany’s blood. The broken body in her arms, jerking, mumbling the final words around a mouth filled with red. Gone. Gone forever, dead, not there, gone. The face in the night.

“Sttt—” She cleared her throat. “Stop.” Her voice sounded strange in her ears. She leaned toward the wench, seeing with unnatural clarity every pore and feature and hair. There was a sensation behind her eyes, like a taut steel wire snapping.

“That’s enough,” she said. The tone of her voice had a high note in it, but it was steady. Somewhere, a part of her not involved in this was proud of it.

“Separate the prisoners,” she said, without taking her eyes off the picture. “The aft section is cleared out? All the children, put them down there. Decurion, get a working party, transfer supplies from the foodstore; it’s on this level. Enough, then weld the door shut, get the picknins down there and weld the hatch to this level shut. Wait, that wench and that wench”—she pointed at two of the mothers, ones who had listed no occupation—“with the children. Move. No, not these two picknins, leave them with the wench here.”

There was a shift, movement, kicks and thuds and shuffling, wailing. A bit of confusion, before the prisoners realized that to Draka serfs were only children up to puberty. Yolande turned to consider them, the booklet gripped tight in one hand. “Docilize the adults,” she said. Breathe. In. Out. “Shift them across.” She keyed her microphone. “Number Two, how’s the mass transfer goin’?”

“Should have the last of it in our tanks in ’bout ten minutes,” he said. “Back up to sixty percent. Everythin’ all right?” That in a worried tone; he must be able to sense something. Later.

“Good,” she replied. “I’m sendin’ ovah the prisoners, docilized. Repressurize Hangar B, secure them to the floor. Make arrangements fo’ minimal maintenance until we get back to the task fo’ce.” There would be plenty of room there; inflatable habitats had been brought along. “Set up fo’ a minimum-detection burn.”

She turned to the Centurion. “Get those bodies,” she said. “Transfer them to the cold-storage locker on this level. Strip everythin’ else out, ’cept cookin’ utensils, water an’ salt, understand?” He nodded, impassive; she had a reputation for successful eccentricity.

Yolande reached back over her shoulder and drew the cutter bar, handling it with slow care. She walked toward the American woman, and held the booklet up beneath her face.

“I know you husband, wench,” she said, almost whispering. “It’s a hereditary trust to hate all Americans,” she continued. “But he . . . took somethin’ . . . that I valued very much. So much so that if’n I had him in my hands, not a lifetime’s pain could pay fo’ it.” She halted, and waited immobile until the sounds of movement had died away behind her. The last of the work party shoved the mass of cans and boxes through the main hatch and into the cabin area beneath, then welded the hatch with a sharp tack of arc heaters. Then there were only she and the Yankee and the two drugged children. Forget them, they were his.

“So tell you husband, tell him my name. Yolande Ingolfsson, tell him that. Tell him to remember the red-haired Draka he killed in India; tell him he’ll curse that day as I’ve cursed it, and mo’. Because befo’ I come fo’ him, I’m goin’ to take everythin’ he values and loves, and destroy it befo’ his eyes; his ideals, his cause, his nation, his family. And then I’m not goin’ to kill him, because . . . Do you know what the problem is, with killin’ people, slut? Do you know?”

Silence that rang and stretched, with her eyes locked to the honey brown of the prisoner’s. “Answer me!” Yolande touched the cutter bar to the other’s cheek. Skin and flesh parted, a long shallow cut; blood rilled out, misting across her eyes. Carefully, carefully. The other woman gasped, but did not move. “Answer me.”

“I don’t know.”

Yolande moved the cutter to the other cheek, sliced the same controlled depth. “Because being dead doesn’t hurt. It’s in livin’ that there’s pain, wench.” Another silence. “Do you understand? I’m leavin’ you here. Lots of space. Plenty of water. Air system’s good fo’ two months, easy, an’ they should be here, so’ you in, oh, minimum three weeks, maximum seven. You can even leave, if’n walkin’ buck naked in vacuum doesn’t bother you.”

“But, but, how shall I feed my children?” the other asked.

Yolande forced herself not to look at the slight drifting forms, pushed the image of Gwen’s face aside. Instead she smiled, and saw the American flinch as she had not at the touch of the knife.

“Try the meat locker!” she shouted, and leapt for the exit.

Twenty-nine days later, Colonel Frederick Lefarge was the first of the boarding party from the Ethan Allen through the airlock of the Pathfinder. His eyes met those of his wife.

They screamed.